Mid-Senior Backend Engineer, Cleo AI
ML integrations
+ Equity
AI personal finance assistant
Job no longer available
AI personal finance assistant
201-500 employees
Job no longer available
+ Equity
201-500 employees
Company mission
To change the world’s relationship with money.
Role
Who you are
- You’re a backend engineer who’s comfortable working in technically complex domains - particularly those involving machine learning, financial decisioning, or large-scale data systems
- You're proficient in Ruby and have experience building and maintaining production systems that interface with machine learning models, data pipelines, or high-throughput decision engines. Exposure to Python and ML concepts is a plus, but deep ML knowledge isn’t required
- You care about observability, system reliability, and deployment best practices. You know how to make integrations robust and maintainable, and how to ensure they operate correctly in production over time
- You’re data-aware - able to reason about data lifecycle, ownership, transformations, and how downstream consumers rely on it. You’re also a strong cross-functional collaborator, able to work closely with product managers, analysts and ML engineers to debug issues and iterate quickly
What the job involves
- You’ll join the team responsible for building and maintaining the decisioning systems that power Cleo’s core product
- This is one of the most business-critical domains at Cleo and one of our most impactful - directly driving user experience, growth, and profitability
- Your primary focus will be integrating ML-driven credit and eligibility models into our Ruby on Rails monolith
- These models, written in Python by ML engineers and data scientists, require robust, scalable integration patterns; you’ll own the productionisation of those services: from data ingestion and interface design to monitoring, alerting, and runtime observability
- You’ll work closely with ML engineers, analysts, and PMs to expose model outputs cleanly, help debug behavioral anomalies, and ensure that stakeholders have the tooling they need to understand how decisions are made
- You’ll also be part of our wider Ruby chapter, working across our Ruby monolith to improve it for both our users as well as your fellow engineers
- Sentence Splitter
- Our Tech Stack
- Cleo is built as a Ruby on Rails monolith with a single React Native app frontend, utilising TypeScript
- We also leverage Python for machine learning services and PostgreSQL for our database, all hosted on AWS
- Our CI/CD pipeline is fully automated, with production deployments happening on every merge via Heroku
- Our backend engineers deploy multiple times a week, and we release our frontend app to Google and Apple for review at least once a week
- While we take a pragmatic approach, we place a strong emphasis on quality
- Our code is peer-reviewed, and we maintain automated testing using Minitest and CircleCI
- We're also actively working towards a more modular architecture, focusing on separating concerns to achieve all the benefits of microservices within a monolith, while progressively refactoring our code as we build new features
- Everyone in the engineering team contributes to driving our technical strategy, voices & ideas from all levels are valued: we are all owners at Cleo
Salary benchmarks
Our take
People are increasingly not satisfied with the products being offered by traditional banks, which have proven slow to react to the needs of younger consumers who expect more from their everyday experiences.
Cleo was one of the first companies to make great use of chatbots that sit within Facebook's messenger app. This chatbot-first approach and Gen Z user base have given it strong virality. It now has millions of registered users, 99% of which are based in the US, leading to a decision to take a year break from the UK market to focus on its US Gen Z customers. And after a successful year in the US its now eyeing up a return to the UK.
Its Series C funding will help the company to double down in the US, where it will make a significant increase in employee headcount, and enable Cleo to maintain and expand its service during an economic downturn.
Financial advice delivered via bots is a crowded space, so Cleo benefits from having a strong brand presence. It has gone for very bold, fun, Gen Z-focused messaging which helps it to stand out from competitors such as Emma, Plum, and Chip.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Jun 2022
$80m
SERIES C
Dec 2020
$44m
SERIES B
Total funding: $137.5m
Company benefits
- Learning and development
- Mental health support
- Agile working
Company values
- Make it Happen
- No bullsh*t
- Learn at Speed
- Bring Good Vibes
Company HQ
London, UK
Leadership
Barnaby Hussey-Yeo
(Founder & CEO)Previously a Data Scientist at Wonga, one of the companies that pioneered the smart use of data for loan decisions. Joined Entrepreneur First where Cleo was formed.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Cleo AI
Annie Jackson (Head of Talent )
- We’ve set up an internal committee of truly passionate people that are dedicated to ensuring Diversity and Inclusion is embedded in how we all operate as a team. We agree on meaningful actions, and get on with implementing them. We have three main focuses right now, which are:
- 1) Improving SocioEconomic diversity across the company
- 2) Increasing the number of women in Leadership roles
- 3) More community outreach
- Check out our 2022 Diversity and Inclusion report, here: https://web.meetcleo.com/blog/cleo-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-report-2022
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